Oh how hard can it be

Funny, I'm falling into my own how-hard-can-it-be convex hull trap I described just three posts ago! It turns out my idea for a support mapping-based convex hull generator isn't that great after all. It works perfectly in 2D, but in 3D it turns out the surface can get concave during the process, which of course will mess up the whole thing, so just forget everything I ever said about convex hull now would you (except perhaps the part about it always being harder than you think)? Thanks. Back to the drawing board. There must be some way to compute convex hulls using only the support direction..

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Bokeh depth of field in a single pass

When I implemented bokeh depth of field I stumbled upon a neat blending trick almost by accident. In my opinion, the quality of depth of field is more related to how objects of different depths blend together, rather than the blur itself. Sure, bokeh is nicer than gaussian, but if the blending is off the whole thing falls flat. There seems to be many different approaches to this out there, most of them requiring multiple passes and sometimes separation of what's behind and in front of the focal plane. I experimented a bit and stumbled upon a nice trick, almost by accident.

I'm not going to get into technical details about lenses, circle of confusion, etc. It has been described very well many times before, so I'm just going to assume you know the basics. I can try to summarize what we want to do in one sentence – render each pixel as a discs where the radius is determined by how out of focus it is, also taking depth into consideration "somehow".

Taking depth into…

Stratified sampling

After finishing my framework overhaul I'm now back on hybrid rendering and screen space raytracing. My first plan was to just port the old renderer to the new framework but I ended up rewriting all of it instead, finally trying out a few things that has been on my mind for a while.

I've been wanting to try stratified sampling for a long time as a way to reduce noise in the diffuse light. The idea is to sample the hemisphere within a certain set of fixed strata instead of completely random to give a more uniform distribution. The direction within each stratum is still random, so it would still cover the whole hemisphere and converge to the same result, just in a slightly more predictable way. I won't go into more detail, but full explanation is all over the Internet, for instance here.

Let's look at the difference between stratified and uniform sampling. To make a fair comparison there is no lighting in these images, just ambient occlusion and an emissive object.

They …

Undo for lazy programmers

I often see people recommend the command pattern for implementing undo/redo in, say, a level editor. While it sure works, it's a lot of code and a lot of work. Some ten years ago I came across an idea that I have used ever since, that is super easy to implement and has worked like a charm for all my projects so far.

Every level editor already has the functionality to serialize the level state (and save it to disk). It also has the ability to load a previously saved state, and the idea is to simply use those to implement undo/redo. I create a stack of memory buffers and serialize the entire level into that after each action is completed. Undo is implemented by walking one step up the stack and load that state. Redo is implemented in the same way by walking a step down the stack and load.

This obviously doesn't work for something like photoshop unless you have terabytes of memory laying around, but in my experience the level information is usually relatively compact and seriali…

Mediocre game technology

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